Obama's pastor: The backstory

Politicians know a troublesome story has “broken through” the Eastern media echo chamber when Jay Leno is laughing at them.

In the case of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., retiring pastor and outgoing spiritual adviser to Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), it took less than 48 hours.

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The fracas started Thursday morning, when ABC’s “Good Morning America” ran a Brian Ross expose on Wright that included old video of him saying: “The government gives them the drugs, builds bigger prisons, passes a three-strike law and then wants us to sing ‘God bless America’? No, no, no. Not God bless America. God [expletive] America.”

On Friday night, there was Leno on NBC’s “Tonight Show” joshing: “ McCain was running so fast from President Bush, he ran into Barack Obama, who was running from his minister.”

The story had burst onto the radar screen of average Americans with as much velocity as any other story during the 2008 campaign.

Political reporters and editors were inundated with e-mails from red-state friends and relatives wanting to know why the brouhaha wasn’t getting more instant and constant coverage from every news outlet.

To reporters who had followed the campaign, it was an old, oft-written story. But this time it had video of Wright saying things like “U.S. of K.K.K.A.,” available on YouTube and played endlessly by cable news channels.

A key part of Obama’s case is electability — the notion that he can heal the nation’s red-blue divide by appealing to Republicans, or “Obamacans,” as he gleefully calls these crossover supporters.

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The coverage of Wright's comments bolstered the effort by Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) to raise vague doubts about the judgment of her rival for the Democratic presidential nomination.

And it revived conservative chatter about Obama’s patriotism that has been fueled by rumors he does not put his hand on his heart for the Pledge of Allegiance (false) and stopped wearing a flag lapel pin (true).

Wright has been the minister to Obama for more than 20 years and gave him the title of his second best-seller, “The Audacity of Hope.” Wright married Obama and his wife, Michelle, and baptized their two daughters.

Wright is pastor of Chicago’s Trinity United Church of Christ, which on its website calls itself “Unashamedly Black and Unapologetically Christian,” and lists “a non-negotiable commitment to Africa” as part of its “ 10-point Vision.”

The minister’s controversial history has been written about countless times throughout the campaign. Wright has ties to the Rev. Louis Farrakhan, the black supremacist leader of the Nation of Islam — a fact that has been noted in more than 100 news stories just in the past few months, according to the Nexis database of news coverage.

Opponents of Obama have constantly pushed reporters to write about the minister, which these critics considered a ticking time bomb for his campaign.

On Feb. 20, after a fiery guest sermon by Wright in Little Rock, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette ran an article that said: “On Tuesday, Wright criticized the U.S. invasion of Iraq and likened the insurgents to the Israelites under Babylonian rule.”

At 9:20 that morning, Obama opponents were already trying to get Politico to link to the story.

That’s why many news outlets — including Politico — did not initially pile on with rehashes after Ross’s story on “Good Morning America.”